That is, focusing on the strategic, business, and financial outcomes that you help to achieve in your professional capacity.

It’s not a laundry list of your key responsibilities or what you do day-to-day. Rather, it’s connecting your work as a professional to the significant outcomes that the organisation wanted to achieve.

Let’s use the UVP example from my previous article for the marketing/sales professional who is looking to join the boards of established companies that are ready to try new techniques to help them continue to grow. Let’s call her Kim.

I enable established organisations to grow and enter new markets through implementing effective and innovative sales and marketing campaigns.

Kim’s UVP

Kim now has to review her key professional achievements and connect them with how they assisted in achieving the critical strategic, business and financial outcomes of the organisation.

For example:

Instead of This: Team lead for the XYZ new markets project.

Use This: Implemented the XYZ new markets system delivering on the projected 25% increase in new customers, a10% increase in current-customer sales, and an improvement in overall profitability of 30%.

Instead of This: Answered customer questions.

Use This: Contributed to customer retention rate of 98% by providing authoritative and complete answers to questions, significantly reducing the financial impact of lost customers by 20% and decreasing the long-term cost per customer acquisition by 35%.

Instead of This: Managed $150,000 marketing budget.

Use This: Invested my $150,000 marketing budget to grow revenue by 27% year-over-year, with a subsequent profit growth of >15% annually, and increased market share from 15% to 35%.

This approach helps Kim to demonstrate her strategic, business, and financial acumen by demonstrating that she understands how what she does in her role impacts the whole business, rather than just her focusing purely on ‘marketing’ or ‘business development’.

It also demonstrates that she knows how to accomplish her marketing / business development goals by working across the organisation, taking her from executive-level thinking, to board-level thinking. In order for businesses to achieve their strategic goals, multiple levers need to be pulled across the entire organisation.

Then, Kim can elaborate on these achievements in her board interview, and add other key achievements that didn’t make it into her board resume.

The critical thing to recognise is that Kim provides key achievements that directly relate back to her UVP, demonstrating her expertise in a way that resonates with her target board(s).

Take it to the Next Level

To make this resonate much more with your target board(s), tailor or adapt your key achievements to the board you are applying to.

This could be something as simple as tweaking the words you use (incorporating language used within the target organisation) or, it could be using different key achievements altogether. You usually don’t have to list ALL of your key achievements (for your board CV, focus on around four highly-relevant key achievements per professional role), so be quite selective with the ones you do include.

How do you know which ones to include? Do your research! You should be closely reviewing the organisation as part of your due diligence, so start before you even apply and use the information you gain from it to inform how you prepare and position your application.

I hope this helps you start to get a clearer picture of how your UVP influences other elements of your board search activities. I’d love to hear about your UVP and how your professional key achievements connect with it. Please feel free to share this in the comments below.

Lisa Cook

Lisa is the founder of Get on Board Australia. She sits on the board of a number of organisations in the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors in Adelaide and Sydney. Lisa holds a degree from Charles Sturt University in business management and marketing, and she has completed the Foundations of Directorship program through AICD.

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Get on Board delivers education and development courses that are open to individuals from all professional backgrounds and all types of industries (public, private, NFP, sporting organisations and clubs, etc.). Get on Board focuses on aspiring directors – those people looking to join a board in the near future – and on new directors – those who are currently in their first to fifth year of sitting on a board. Everything that we do is geared towards developing the corporate governance skills, and the business, strategic and financial acumen of new and aspiring company directors.